Ode to Divorce
by expletive deleted
Summary: Bianchi is determined to make her own way - but despite her resolve, she allows two telephone conversations to set the course of her life for years.


**Prompt:** (Taken from a challenge in the anime-manga community on Dreamwidth.) Katekyo Hitman Reborn, any, breaking point - "I am a pacifist. And I will be a pacifist until I die or someone threatens my mother." A Softer World 638

**Notes**: I'm assuming that Bianchi found out at a later point about the things that she told Gokudera in chapter 282. This fic is based on what was revealed up to chapter 162. The title is from a Regina Spektor song.

* * *

"I left."

"Araghgle_fuck_," said Hayato, as he tended to. At least the swearing was progress. Everything else he'd said since her greeting had been pure gurgling.

"Where are you staying?" Bianchi said, glancing suspiciously at her cellphone in lieu of being able to look at him. Her baby brother had a fragile constitution and was awful at looking after it. "The only accurate information I could find about you has turned out to be this phone number."

"So it was you!" Hayato rasped. "When the word got out that someone was looking for me, of course I avoided my usual spots!"

"This is a hard way of life, isn't it," Bianchi said. She thought about this world she'd stepped into, one that was ready to eat the unwary.

Hayato's voice gained a babyish whine. "It's only hard 'cause you're making it that way! Wh-what the hell are you doing, looking for me?" The slightest tremble of an indrawn breath. "Looking for me _now_?"

She stood up from the couch and the loose curve of Romeo's arm around her shoulders. He draped it around her hips for a squeeze and gave an encouraging smile. He had been wholly supportive ever since she'd told him that she was leaving home and the reason for it, but she couldn't bear to have such a close witness to this conversation. She squeezed his hand before moving away to the window of the hotel room.

The street outside was relatively quiet - but it was not the kind of quiet created by expensive black cars that contained suited men with guns, and at the moment that was all Bianchi wanted. Father seemed to have stopped looking for her even sooner than he'd stopped looking when Hayato ran away. Hayato has decided, Father had said. He no longer bears the family name, by his own choice. He does not want to belong to us, and he has that right.

And so he did, after all. She should have wondered, even as a child, why Hayato looked so different to everyone and had a strange name, but he was her brother.

"I left because Father told me," Bianchi said. "About what he did to my mother and to yours."

Another snagged inhalation, shocked and suddenly wet. Bianchi could picture Hayato's face precisely from those few times he'd cried, except that the image was years too young. She pressed the phone hard to her ear. "We should meet, Hayato. Talk in person."

"Sounds like you know the whole story." His voice was choked. "There's nothing to talk about."

Bianchi wanted to raise her voice that minute bit that got her anything she wanted - back at the castle. All her life, when she wanted something this badly, within minutes she'd have it or be promised it.

"I didn't know before," she said through pursed lips, pacing a few steps. "All this time, I thought you'd left us. Now Father's told me - said that fifteen is old enough to handle it, and he didn't want me to hear it from someone else. He told me the whole story. He said _he'd been in love_." Not even that he _is_ in love, as if it were so easy to let go of a love that he'd strayed from his wife for. She'd have spat in his face if her mouth hadn't been bone-dry.

"But he did _that_ to my mother!" It burst out of Hayato, raw as on the day he'd run. But this time he listened for her reply, harsh breaths resounding down the line.

"So I left." Bianchi looked out the window at the road, thinking of where her home had once been, and felt a certain satisfaction. "He doesn't deserve to have a family at all, and now he doesn't. I won't be his little princess anymore, not ever again." She breathed in, deep, and out again. Her voice steadied. "I'm with my boyfriend, Romeo. I'm hiring out my skills as an assassin."

"What?" Hayato was shocked enough that it drove other emotions out. "_You're_—but you never, you're not... You're the one who always told me not to talk about stupid stuff like that!"

Bianchi pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes. "As if I still care what Father doesn't want us talking about? My skills have sharpened, so I'll make use of them!"

"But ... but that's..." Hayato didn't get as far as telling her she'd never make it. Some of Father's close associates and her bodyguards had contacted her to say that, before she'd got rid of her old cellphone.

At fleeting moments through these past tumultuous days, she'd felt like they might be right. There was one vital part of her plan to leave that she had chosen to neglect.

"I didn't kill him, though. Father," Bianchi said. "I'm sorry."

"_Bianchi!_"

"It's nothing less than he deserves." Hayato did not protest, and did not agree - she couldn't hear him breathe. "But I thought - and Mother said, when I apologised to her too - that having him dead wouldn't make her any happier. And if ... if she loves him, after all..." (How could she? But how could she _stop_?) "I couldn't hurt her more, not after everything that's already happened. After all, she'd have killed him long ago if it would have helped."

Sucking, uncertain silence on the other end of the line.

"You know how she is," Bianchi said softly, like throwing an anchor into an unknown ocean.

"She... Yeah, she could've." Hayato's voice was even softer, like he didn't know a thing about how to be reassuring. "With a pick-axe. While he slept." At least he was accurate.

"I'm sorry she didn't love you," Bianchi said as quick as she could, "but I always did. When I thought you ran I was angry but you're my brother, Hayato, and I love you. Can we meet?"

He ended the call and didn't speak to her for a month.

After which there were incredibly angry text messages in response to the messages she'd left him, where Hayato refused to acknowledge their previous conversation. The streets had done highly specialised wonders for his vocabulary. Bianchi made note; she might have to adapt that way too.

Romeo said she made a strong-enough impression with her own attitude - he only helped her work on her wardrobe. No more dresses, ribbons, and flat Mary Janes. She got a tattoo, and then got another. She got knee-high boots, slouchy t-shirts and jeans, and spiked jewellery. She went far beyond the miniskirt and leather jacket she'd dressed up in the last time she had gone to her father when he asked for her - simply to have his daughter beside him, she knew, the placid, pampered girl who was always as happy to see him as he was to see her.

_"You look like a common whore!"_

"Would you prefer that I look like an uncommon one?"

And so they'd said goodbye.

Bianchi still regretted saying that. It sounded like an insult to Hayato's mother. Never that.

She remembered that woman, and the way Hayato had run to her. That woman had never gone to Father when she visited their house, and he hadn't gone to her - not where Bianchi had been able to see. The woman had loved Father, the way he told it. Bianchi hated her, and if she'd been alive, she would have protected her. She was Hayato's mother.

It was years too late for protection. Even Hayato didn't need hers, and seemed determined to keep proving it. To her own surprise, Bianchi thought that she ought to let him, as she discovered how independence could be difficult to manage. Romeo still protected her in many ways, with his knack with guns and making deals, while she learned.

At least it came naturally. Not easily - deliberately watching someone stagger, choke, and fall, and to count that as success - but nonetheless, naturally. Only sometimes, Bianchi couldn't help but wonder if this was why Father had tried to keep her and Hayato sheltered.

She didn't want to think of him at all.

At times like that Bianchi reached for her cellphone again. But it took a long time before she made the call, remembering the pain of the last time they'd spoken; finally, she did.

"Hello, Mother." She sat at the table of the flat she shared with Romeo, and straightened up. Mother liked her to watch her posture.

"Bianchi! Sweetheart, it's so good to hear from you!"

Bianchi slumped in relief, posture be damned. "I should have called ages ago," she murmured, but she was a little too happy to sound properly contrite. Mother sounded just fine. So, so much better than how brittle she'd sounded when Bianchi told her that she knew about Hayato's mother.

"Yes, you should have!" Mother chided, still with a smile in her voice. "Do you know, you've been making—well, the things I've heard—_such_ a reputation for yourself!"

She smiled. "All your friends are gossiping?" It sounded better to call Mother's contact networks her 'friends'.

"Every one of them have been telling me about your successes! Some with good humour - but, oh, some of these rat-bastards, you would not believe what they say, these..."

Bianchi mouthed along to the sudden, spitting anger. Her mother was a lot like her brother, with how easily she could change moods like that. Perhaps there was something about distance that made you angry.

"Mother," she said, interrupting a story she would usually have stretched out on the couch for while her mother worked back down from her rage, laughing sometimes, taking notes of leads for jobs at other times. Mother stopped talking with a note of surprise.

"I love you," said Bianchi. It had been rare for Mother to stay in the castle for more than a week at a time, always flitting from one holiday home or hotel around Europe to the next, building a vast web of contacts and barely stepping foot in the same house as her husband. Each of her visits had shone for Bianchi, and during those times they'd barely left each other's sides. "You know, of course. But I thought I'd say it."

"For all the good _that_ does," said Mother, bitter as bile.

She always had gone silent and white-knuckled whenever she heard that word, and Bianchi had never dared to ask why. Mother recovered her beautiful voice and her composure within moments, but with those words hanging in the air it was difficult to keep talking. They soon said goodbye and rang off. Their conversations had often been equally short on their long-distance phone calls when Bianchi was young. Mother had rarely given Hayato even that.

Between them, Bianchi's family had shredded love, hated it, disbelieved the idea of it. Stupid of both of them, but she forgave them easily. She continued to make calls and send letters and photographs, taking every moment with them she could. "Love is enough," she would tell Romeo when his arms went around her neck and he smirked. "Love is everything", and it reverberated to the heart of her.

All the same - there were things that came naturally in time, for a girl like her. Not easily, but naturally.

Bianchi stayed far away from her family, and continued to make her own path as she let theirs lead away from. She thought that out in the world, the pain of it might be a lesson she needed.


End file.
